Achieving the hardest goals of our life, in a systematic and an orderly manner, is what most of us desire. However, neither our school nor the society prepares us for the obstructions accompanying our ambitions. Nevertheless, scores of people have managed to achieve the impossible despite the presence of innumerable impedances. But the million dollar question is – How exactly do these people achieve their goals and can a normal person, like us, do that too?
Fortunately, the answer is yes! These people are human beings just like any of us, who just figured out the best ways to achieve success in their lives (not to exclude their relentless toil and perseverance).
Here we are going to discuss the 5 important strategies we all must follow, if we want to succeed in any of our endeavors.
1. Instead of the goals, focus on the system.
Almost all of us tend to focus more on our goal instead of crafting the path that leads us to it. Goals are like the destination we want to reach, while a system is the path to it. Mr. James Clear in his bestselling book Atomic Habits has very practically thrown light on this topic. He says that “Goals are about the results you want to achieve. Systems are about the process that lead us to those results”.
Suppose the goal is to reduce our weight by the end of the year, then you should spend more time in thinking about the exercises and diet that will make you fit and healthy.
If you are involved in business, your goal might be to build a billion dollar empire . Then your system is how you test product ideas, hire employees, and run marketing campaigns.
Although, it should be noted that keeping our goal in mind is also important. Our goals set the direction in which we have to advance in order to achieve the desired changes we wish to see in our lives.uccessful and unsuccessful people have the same goals. Every student wants to be a topper of the class, every employee wants to be the best employee of the month, every team wants to win the World Cup, however, only the best will find success in it’s endeavour. These cases form the foundation of the “Survivorship Bias”. Furthermore, all the above examples prove that, just setting the goals isn’t gonna fulfill our ambitions. Construction of a system, which is relevant to the goal is going to give us the desired output.
Successful and unsuccessful people have the same goals. Every student wants to be a topper of the class, every employee wants to be the best employee of the month, every team wants to win the World Cup, however, only the best will find success in it’s endeavour. These cases form the foundation of the “Survivorship Bias”. Furthermore, all the above examples prove that, just setting the goals isn’t gonna fulfill our ambitions. Construction of a system, which is relevant to the goal is going to help us receive the desired output.
If you want to cut down a tree, you will first have to sharpen the axe. The sharpening of the axe is a part of our system, while cutting down the tree is our goal.
Achieving a goal is only going to provide a momentary change in your life. Let us assume your goal is to clean up a messy room. Once you have collected all your courage and motivation, you are going to somehow clean your room. However, if we somehow change our habits and don’t mess up the room and keep it tidy in the first place, then that system is going to be everlasting and much more satisfying.
So the next time, whenever you plan to chase any goal, try crafting out the system first.
2. Optimize the Environment
What if I tell you that you can very easily trick your brain into doing hard tasks at hand, just by optimizing the surrounding environment. In addition to that, you don’t even have to look out for motivation or encouragement by your will power.
Human beings are the most intelligent specie on this planet. We sense our ambience using sight, smell, sound, touch and taste. Also, it is estimated that we posses about eleven million sensory receptors out of which around ten million are just associated with our sight. So we are a lot more dependant on our eyes, than we can imagine. Given that fact, it won’t be inappropriate to say that our vision drives most of our brain’s motivation.
So if we can somehow, make our eyes see the things we want to do, but can’t due to the lack of motivation, we have a better chance of getting those tasks done. Let me illustrate this by an example. Suppose, you are driving, and you see a red light at the signal, your brain tells you to stop the car, until the signal turns green, which is an another indicator, guiding us to go forward. So what exactly is happening in this entire scenario?
The red light is a “cue” which our eyes capture. The eyes then send this signal to your brain, in response to which you stop. Your brain, after years of receiving such stimuli has associated “Red Light” with “STOP”.
“Environment is the invisible hand that shapes human behavior” says Mr. James Clear. In 1936, psychologist Kurt Lewin wrote a simple equation that makes a powerful statement: Behavior is a function of the Person in
their Environment, or B = f (P,E).
So the next time, you want to spend more time on your guitar practise, keep it right in the middle of your living room where your eyes can see it. If you want to drink more water, keep a water bottle on your side table, or rather keep it on your working table. If you want to stay, keep your running shoes right under your bed or withing the range of your sight.
Be the architect of your own world !
3. Say No to “Multitasking”
In our busy world, where we have innumerable pending works at hand, we are sometimes intentionally or unintentionally driven towards multitasking. What we don’t realize is how brutally multitasking can damage out productivity.
The human brain’s design doesn’t comply with multitasking since it can only focus on one thing at a time. It not only harms our brain’s capability to to concentrate on things but also our efficiency and performance.
According to the researchers at the Stanford University, multitasking people have difficult in recalling and have lower IQ level than the people who avoid multitasking. Furthermore, a study was conducted in which a group of people who usually multitask and a group of people who barely multitask were summoned, and they were asked to perform certain activities like texting and writing at the same time. It was found out that multitaskers even failed at multitasking, while non-multitaskers performed way better than they did.
A simple way to understand is by considering that, if we have more tasks then we are going to make more mistakes and if we do more mistakes our brain will stop motivating us to do that task anymore. It kills the will of our body to perform. In addition to that, it has negative impact on our life as well. Studies have shown that people who usually multitask, tend to have low self esteem, and they are socially awkward. Furthermore, multitasking harms our cognitive skills and devours our time more than single tasking.
Unlike the computer system, our brain takes some time to switch from one task to another. We store the residual thoughts and it takes some time for these thoughts to drive away such that we can focus on the task at hand. It is recommended that there should be at least a gap of 10 minutes between two consecutive tasks.
So next time, you plan on accomplishing any piece of work, make sure that’s the only thing you’re making your brain do.
4. QUIT Social Media
Wait ! What ? You must be kidding right ? You want me to quit social media? Are you even in your senses ?
Well the above replies are amongst the most common ones that I receive, whenever I ask someone to quit social media. Honestly I have no aversion against these social platforms or it’s users. To be honest, just a year back I was a facebook addict myself, however, as soon as I entered into my self improvement journey, I realized that I was nothing but a slave in the hands of these billion dollar companies.
Social media is designed to be addictive. The more time you spend on them, the more money these companies are gonna make. While scrolling through any social media platform, dopamine, a chemical hormone responsible for pleasure, is induced in our body. This same hormone is released when we cuddle someone. Furthermore, it is also responsible for making us addictive. An extremely high amount of dopamine is induced in drug addicts. Cigarettes play an important role in the production of this hormone as well. So, consequently whatever thing helps our body to induce this chemical in high amounts, we become addicted to that entity.
We live in an extremely distracted world where all the resources are available in hand. These resources fragment our brain’s capability to concentrate on the things that require a deep thought process and concentration. Social media is one of that, so called, resource.
Additionally, it must be noted that our willpower is limited. With every task we do, some of our will power is consumed. The use of social media drinks a lot of it resulting in lack of motivation and the will to perform a hard job.
So, to sum it up, social media harms our ability to concentrate, our ability to empathize and our will to work hard towards achieving a goal.
5. Quantity > Quality
It doesn’t matter how you are performing a certain action, but instead how many times you are performing it. We lack motivation since we are looking out for the quality from our work, which is hard to achieve at the initial stages of any task which requires high amount of cognitive skills, like playing a violin or learning to drive a car. But, when we perform a certain action repetitively, the neurons in our brain start forming a bridge of connection. This connection keeps on getting stronger and better as we repeat that action.
If you and your friend are asked to click photographs, where your friend is asked to click just ONE quality photograph while you are asked to click twenty of them and then submit the best amongst them, there is a high chance that your best photograph is definitely going to better than the one of your friend.
When we repeat a certain action, we learn, strategize, fail, and then compensate which then finally hones our skills in that particular domain.
So, the next time, if you’re trying to perform a job and you find yourself demotivated soon enough, just remember with each trial, you are actually getting better.
“Practise makes a man perfect”
Harsh Words 